The Stories of Richard Bausch

by Richard Bausch

  “Well,” said Bagley, clearing his throat again. “I seem to recall that when old Wilson was upset he was quick to shoot people, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Was he fast?”

  “I don’t think he thought in those terms. He usually had his six-shooter out and already cocked if he thought there would be any reason to use it.”

  Grafton said, “You know quite a bit about this sort of thing, don’t you, Reverend?”

  Bagley nodded, folding his pudgy hands across his chest. He looked at me. “I guess I saw some things over the years of my enslavement to the angels of appetite and sin.”

  “But you were never in a gunfight?”

  “I said I usually run.”

  “Did you ever find yourself in a circumstance where you couldn’t run?”

  “Once or twice,” he said, reaching for the bottle.

  “And?” I said.

  He smiled, drank, wiped his whiskered mouth. “Why, I shot from ambush, of course.” Then he laughed loud, offering me the bottle. “There are several states of this tragic and beautiful union which I am not particularly anxious to see again.”

  “Do you mean you’re wanted?” Grafton asked him.

  “I don’t really know,” he said. “It’s been a long time. And I’ve traveled so far.”

  When he wasn’t preaching, he seemed fairly inactive. Marian had never had any trouble figuring where he’d be. His sole support was what he could collect on Sunday, and what he could make helping out with the work of keeping the stables. He was fond of saying that no task was too low for sinners. Sometimes when he preached, if he wasn’t getting on about the dire troubles the world was heading for, he was inclined to talk about the dignity provided by simple work. He could be almost sweet about that sort of idea. And sometimes, too, he talked about odd, unconnected things: Galileo and Napoleon; the new English queen; the tragic early death of the English writer, Dickens. Everything was a lesson. He’d fix you with his old, hooded eyes, and his thin lips would begin to move, as though he were chewing something unpalatable that was hurting his gums, and then he would begin to talk, the sentences lining up one after the other, perfectly symmetrical and organized as well as any written speech. We had all got to trusting him, not as the figure we could look to for succor or solace, particularly, but as a predictable and consistent form of diversion, of entertainment.

  At least that was how I felt about him.

  And so some coloration of that feeling was rising in me as I drove the wagon into town and stopped in front of Grafton’s, wondering if Bagley was there and what would happen if indeed he was. The street was empty. There weren’t even any other horses around. Wind picked up dust and carried it in a drunken spiral across the way, where the dirt lane turned toward the stables.

  “Grafton,” Marian called, getting down. “You open or not?”

  The door was ajar. She went up on the wooden sidewalk and down to the end of it, looked up and down that part of the crossing street. She waited there a minute. Then she came back and went into the saloon. In the wagon now it was just me and our returning visitor.

  I said, “Tell me. What did Bagley-Phegley—do?”

  “I can’t say I know for sure. His name was posted. There’s a reward.”

  “How much?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Six hundred dollars dead.”

  “And alive?”

  “Five hundred twenty-five.”

  I looked at him.

  “It was a private post.”

  “And you don’t even know what he did?”

  “I could use the extra seventy-five dollars,” he said. “But I’m willing to take him back alive.”

  “You’re—you’re a peace officer, then?”

  He shook his head, looking beyond me at the tall facade of Grafton’s building.

  “Is it personal?” I said.

  “It’s business,” he mumbled. “Old business, too.”

  “Listen,” I said. “Where’d you go when you left us that day? After the fight here.”

  He looked at me. “Fight?”

  I waited.

  He seemed to consider a moment. “Chinook Falls, I guess.”

  “Chinook Falls?” I said. “That’s the next town over. That’s only a day’s ride.”

  He nodded. “Guess it is.”

  “How long did you stay there?”

  Again, he thought a moment. “I don’t know—four or five years, maybe.”

  “Four or five years?”

  “I got married.”

  I stared at him.

  “Yep. Got married and settled down awhile. But she wasn’t much for sitting around in the evenings.”

  “She left you.”

  “In a way,” he said. “I guess so.”

  “What happened?”

  “Got sick on gin,” he muttered, chewing on something he’d brought out of his shirt pocket; it looked like a small piece of straw. “Got real sick on gin one night. Died before I could do much of anything for her.”

  A moment later I said, “Then where’d you go?”

  He shrugged, took the piece of straw from his mouth. “Around.”

  “Around where?” I asked, and he named several other towns, not one of which was farther than two days’ ride from where we were sitting.

  “That’s it?” I said.

  He nodded, not quite looking at me. “Pretty much.”

  “You’re just a bounty hunter,” I said. “Right?”

  And he gave me a quizzical look, as if he hadn’t understood the question.

  “What do you think?”

  “Well, for God’s sake,” I said. “And you wanted me to grow straight and tall.”

  “You were a little boy. That’s what you say to little boys. Some of them do, you know. Some of them grow straight and tall. Look at Joe Starrett.”

  “I don’t want to think about that,” I said. “I was thinking about you.”

  Now Marian came out of the saloon, and behind her Grafton stood, looking worried. “Don’t come in,” he said. “I don’t want any trouble here. I’m too old for it.” He squinted, peering at us.

  “We’re looking for Bagley,” I said. By now I simply wanted to see what would happen.

  “I don’t think you should come here.”

  “Is he in there?” I said.

  “He’s where he always is this time of day,” Grafton said. “The stables, sleeping it off.”

  Marian had climbed back onto the wagon seat. “Took me a strain getting that much out of him,” she muttered. Then she turned to me. “Take me to the stables.”

  “Wait,” said Grafton. “I’m coming along, too.” And he hurried down and climbed up into the back of the wagon, arranging his besmirched white apron over his knees.

  So it was the four of us who rode around to the stables and pulled up at the shady, open entrance. We sat there for a while. Then Marian got down and stood in the rising dust and looked at me. “I’m going to go tell him we’re here.”

  “He’s a man who will use a gun,” Shane said.

  “This isn’t your man,” said Marian.

  And Bagley’s voice came from one of the windows above the street, I couldn’t see which one. “Who wants to see the preacher?”

  Now Grafton got down, too. He and Marian were standing there next to the wagon.

  “Bagley,” I said. “There’s a man here looking for somebody named—”

  But then Marian went running toward the open doorway. “Don’t shoot!” she yelled. “Don’t anybody shoot!”

  Grafton had moved to take hold of her arms as she swept past him. She was dragging him with her toward the shade of the building.

  From the nearest window, I saw Bagley’s black gun barrel jutting out.

  “Everybody just be calm!” Marian was shouting. “Let’s all just wait a little bit! Please!”

  But nobody waited for anything. Bagley fired from the window and the bullet hit the planks just below my foot. I have no idea
what he could’ve been trying to hit, but I assumed he had through some mistake been aiming at me, so I dove into the back of the wagon—and there I collided painfully with the balding, deeply lined face of my childhood hero.

  I had struck him on the bridge of the nose with my forehead, and instantly there was blood. It covered both of us. We looked at each other. I saw blind, dumb terror in his eyes. All around us was the roar of gunfire, explosions that seemed to come nearer, and we were crouching there, bloody and staring at each other. “Save me,” I said, feeling all the more frightened for what I saw in his eyes—the scared little life there, wincing back from danger, sinking, showing pain and confusion and weakness, too. I never hated any face more, all my long life.

  I had been a boy when the other thing happened. I had remembered it a certain way all those years, and had told the story a certain way, and now, here, under the random explosive, struck-wood sound of ricocheting bullets, I was being given something truer than what I’d held in my mind all that time.

  At least that is what I’ve been able to make of it. I know that everything seemed terribly familiar, and that something about it was almost derisively itself, as if I could never have experienced it in any fashion but like this, face down in a wagon bed with my hands over my head.

  “Everybody shut up!” Marian was yelling. “Everybody stop!”

  From somewhere came the sound of someone reloading, and I heard Bagley’s voice. “One, two, three.” His voice was imbued with an eerie kind of music, like happiness.

  “Bagley!” I screamed. “It’s me!”

  “I’m going to have to shoot all of you,” he said. “That’s the way it’s going to have to be now. Unless you turn that wagon around and get out fast. And take him with you.”

  “John Bagley, you listen to me,” Marian said from somewhere in the dust.

  But then everything was obliterated in the din, the tumult which followed. It seemed to go on and on, and to grow louder. I didn’t know where anyone was. I lay there in the wagon bed and cried for my life, and then it was over and in the quiet that followed—the quiet that was like something muffled on the eardrums, a physical feeling, a woolly, prickly itch on the skin, coupled with the paralyzed sense of a dreadful dumbfoundedness—I heard my own murmuring, and came to understand that I had survived. After a long wait, I stood in the wagon bed and looked at Marian sitting, alive and untouched, in the dust of the street, her hands held tight over her ears like a child trying to drown out the thunderous upheaval of a storm. Poor Grafton was sitting against one of the bales of hay by the stable door, his hands open on his thighs as though he had just paused there to get out of the brilliant autumn sun that was beating down out of the quiet sky. Bagley lay in the upstairs window, his head lolling down over the pocked sill. A stray breeze stirred his hair. The man who had brought his gun back into the valley lay at the back wheel of the wagon, face up to the light, looking almost serene. The whole thing had taken ten seconds, if that.

  I have come from there to here.

  I helped Marian up onto the wagon seat and drove her home. We didn’t say anything; we didn’t even go near each other for several days (and then it was only to stare across the table at each other while we ate the roast she’d made; it was as if we were both afraid of what might be uncovered if we allowed ourselves to speak at all). Someone else, I don’t know—someone from the town—took the others away and buried them. The next time I went into town, Grafton’s was closed, and people were sitting around on the sidewalk in front, leaning against the side of the building. Apparently Grafton’s whore was challenging the arrangements or something: nobody could touch a thing in the place until it got settled, one way or the other. Anyway, it wasn’t going to be Grafton’s anymore.

  Some years later, when she’d grown too tired and too confused to know much of anything, Marian passed on quietly in her sleep. I buried her with Joe Starrett out behind the barn of that place. I traveled far away from the valley—much farther than the next town—and never went back. I have grown old. My life draws back behind me like a long train. I never knew what it was Shane intended for himself, nor what Bagley had done to be posted, nor what had caused him to open fire that way, any more than I was ever to know what poor Grafton must’ve thought when he dropped down in the street with the bullet in his lungs.

  When I think of it, though, I find a small truth that means more to me than all my subsequent reading, all my late studies to puzzle out the nature of things: of course, nothing could be simpler, and perhaps it is already quite obvious to you, but what I remember now, in great age, is that during the loudest and most terrifying part of the exchange of shots, when the catastrophe was going on all around me and I was most certain that I was going to be killed, I lay shivering in the knowledge, the discovery really, that the story I’d been telling all my life was in fact not true enough—was little more than a boy’s exaggeration.

  And this is what I have come to tell you.

  That the clearest memory of my life is a thing I made up in my head. For that afternoon at the stables, in the middle of terror, with the guns going off, I saw it all once again, without words, the story I’d been telling and that I’d believed since I was seven years old, only this time it was just as it had actually been. I saw again the moment when the gunfighter Wilson went for his Colt, and he was indeed not all in black, not wearing two guns nor any holster, but sloppily draped in some flannels of such faded color as to be not quite identifiable. I saw it like a searing vision, what it had really been—a man trying to get a long-barreled pistol out of the soiled tangle of his pants, catching the hammer of it on the tail of his shirt. And the other, the hero, struggling with his own weapon, raising it, taking aim, and firing—that shattering detonation, a blade of fire from the end of the pistol, and Wilson’s body crashing down between a chair and table. The hero then turning to see the cattle baron on the other side of the room reach into his own tight coat, and a boy watching the hero raise his heavy Colt to fire upon the cattle baron, too—the cattle baron never even getting his weapon clear of the shoulder holster he had.

  And it was all over. Like murder, nothing more.

  Do you see? No backshooter firing from the gallery. Just the awful moment when the cattle baron realized he would be shot. And the boy who watched from under the saloon door saw the surprised, helpless, frightened look on the old whiskered face, saw this and closed his eyes, hearing the second shot, the second blast, squeezing his eyes shut for fear of looking upon death anymore, but hearing the awful, clattering fall and the stillness that followed, knowing what it was, what it meant, and hearing, too, now, the little other sounds—the settling in of ragged breath, the sigh of relief. Beginning, even then, in spite of himself—in spite of what he had just seen—to make it over in his young mind, remembering it already like all the tales of the Old West, the story as he would tell it for more than eighty years, even as he could hear the shaken voice, almost garrulous, of the one who had managed to stay alive—the one who was Shane, and who, this time, hadn’t been killed in the stupid, fumbling blur of gunfighting.

  DESIGN

  The Reverend Tarmigian was not well. You could see it in his face—a certain hollowness, a certain blueness in the skin. His eyes lacked luster and brightness. He had a persistent dry, deep cough; he’d lost a lot of weight. And yet on this fine, breezy October day he was out on the big lawn in front of his church, raking leaves. Father Russell watched him from the window of his study, and knew that if he didn’t walk over there and say something to him about it, this morning—like so many recent mornings—would be spent fretting and worrying about Tarmigian, seventy-two years old and out raking leaves in the windy sun. He had been planning to speak to the old man for weeks, but what could you say to a man like that? An institution in Point Royal, old Tarmigian had been pastor of the neighboring church—Faith Baptist, only a hundred or so yards away on the other side of Tallawaw Creek—for more than three decades. He referred to himself in conversatio
n as the Reverend Fixture. He was a stooped, frail man with wrinkled blue eyes and fleecy blond hair that showed freckled scalp in the light; there were dimples in his cheeks. One of his favorite jokes—one of the many jokes he was fond of repeating—was that he had the eyes of a clown built above the natural curve of a baby’s bottom. He’d touch the dimples and smile, saying a thing like that. And the truth was he tended to joke too much—even about the fact that he was apparently taxing himself beyond the dictates of good health for a man his age.

  It seemed clear to Father Russell—who was all too often worried about his own health, though he was thirty years younger than Tarmigian—that something was driving the older man to these stunts of killing work: raking leaves all morning in the fall breezes; climbing on a ladder to clear drain-spouts; or, as he had done one day last week, lugging a bag of mulch across the road and up the hill to the little cemetery where his wife lay buried, as if there weren’t plenty of people within arm’s reach on any Sunday who would have done it gladly for him (and would have just as gladly stood by while he said his few quiet prayers over the grave). His wife had been dead twenty years, he had the reverential respect of the whole countryside, but something was driving the man and, withal, there was often a species of amused cheerfulness about him almost like elation, as though he were keeping some wonderful secret.

  It was perplexing; it violated all the rules of respect for one’s own best interest. And today, watching him rake leaves, Father Russell determined that he would speak to him about it. He would simply confront him—broach the subject of health and express an opinion. Father Russell understood enough about himself to know that this concern would seem uncharacteristically personal on his part—it might even be misconstrued in some way—but as he put a jacket on and started out of his own church, it was with a small thrill of resolution. It was time to interfere, regardless of the age difference and regardless of the fact that it had been Father Russell’s wish to find ways of avoiding the company of the older man.

  Tarmigian’s church was at the top of a long incline, across a stone bridge over Tallawaw Creek. It was a rigorous walk, even on a cool day, as this one was. The air was blue and cool in the mottled shade, and there were little patches of steam on the creek when the breezes were still. The Reverend Tarmigian stopped working, leaned on the handle of the rake and watched Father Russell cross the bridge.